INTERVIEW: Life on Eris on ‘The Risk,’ Creativity and More

Life on Eris are formed of husband-wife duo Chris Carmack (Nashville, Grey’s Anatomy) and Erin Slaver. Their debut EP – Stonewall – was released last year, ahead of the release of their latest single ‘The Risk.’ Here, we interview the duo about the single, their creativity during the pandemic and producing their own music.

Hi guys, how are you getting on? How have you navigated the last year and are things beginning to open up again? 

Chris: I don’t know, they might. They might be, but we’re keeping it pretty tight.

Erin: Yeah, with his job.

Chris: Yeah, working on set, people are relying on us to stay COVID-free.

It must be quite nice to kind of have something going. I mean, obviously, ‘The Risk’ came out, so it must be nice to have some kind of momentum and something going on.

Erin: I hear that. You know, he goes into film, but he, he has a very busy life and I’m either playing pretend kitchen with my four year old or I’m getting to make music. So for me, the music is everything. It’s awesome. I mean, it doesn’t feel like we have much going on because it still feels like a pandemic – still home all the time but it’s very nice to know that, during this time, we have been putting out music and we have been working on that goal.

Have you found that you have been creatively inspired during this time?

Chris: I think we’ve been very busy and creative, some of the tracks from Stonewall, we had written before the pandemic began, but our latest two releases were written during and recorded entirely in our home studio. That’s one of the things that the pandemic has done for us – it has really driven us into our home studio to produce and record everything ourselves, which has been a lot of fun. I love that process.

I was going to ask, is that something that was important to you – to self produce the projects? Or was that something that was kind of driven by necessity more than anything else?

Chris: Well, a little bit of both. You know, originally, we started Stonewall before there was a pandemic, but we kind of shifted in our sonic approach. One of the reasons we chose to self-produce was because we weren’t sure how we wanted it to turn out. We were exploring the vision of it the whole way through and it has a very sort of textured and layered approach, because some days we scrapped almost everything and were like let’s keep just this one track or this one sound we have. It’s a very, sort of, lived-in sonic experience and that’s why we chose to self-produce that, then these last two tracks are so produced. We just mainly wanted to put something out and the only way we had to do it was our home studio. It felt really scary at first to say. I remember when we were first working on the Stonewall-EP, we said ‘Well, we could produce it ourselves.’ I thought that’s insane, we can’t do this – people don’t do that, people have a producer. We spent a lot of time on the songs on the first project, then it felt okay – we’d done it and we could do this. So, I feel like there’s more freedom now, there’s a little more confidence there to make more music and to keep doing it ourselves. We might want to collaborate and bring in some people once the pandemic’s over, but, for now, the fact that we can give content and music to the people who do enjoy what we’ve released is awesome.

You also have returned a little bit to that country sound on ‘The Risk.’ I know that you guys met on Nashville, so do you think that would have happened to return to that country sound? Was it an organic thing that was always going to happen?

Chris: I think so.

Erin: I think that’s kind of how we write. I mean, we’re very pleased with what happened with Stonewall and how it turned out, but it really was a bit laborious, it was a lot of work. Now, I think we’re turning more to the approach of – let’s write the song and then turn the microphone on the instruments that we’re playing, and how it sounds and let that be the record. You know, we’re both songwriters, we both did acoustic rounds all round Nashville and we write singer-songwriter, country kind of tunes and now I think we’re just playing it how we wrote it.

I also think so much about country these days leads with the song. You started as songwriters, and this is a genre that puts the songwriting and storytelling at the forefront.

Erin: We write the song first. We don’t just produce a track and say, ‘okay, write something to go with it’. It’s about telling a story, and then putting production around it. As Chris mentioned, we’re both trained instrumentalists, I spent my life learning the violin, playing fiddle playing in bands touring. So, I mean, we shine with our acoustic instruments in our hand. So, you know, why would we want to move away from that? I think we’re exploring a whole new element of production, which is arrangement. With our current writing and our current producing we’ve been really focused on arrangement, as opposed to filling things up with sound.

I also wanted to talk about you taking a different thematic angle on ‘The Risk’ as opposed to on Stonewall. You took it back to the beginning on that one, so how fun was it to go back down memory lane and revisit that?

Erin: It was great, I think it was much needed turn.As Chris mentioned, during the pandemic, we were just kind of feeling down and being uninspired or just needing something inspirational. Instead of, in the past, we’ve just tapped into our emotions through conflict and we were just over it. It was a conscious decision, we need to write something that’s happy. It was easy to tap into those memories, those happy memories.

It’s funny actually how sometimes it’s easier to talk about pain rather than happiness.

Erin: I think it’s easier for all of us, you know. If I just sit down with a guitar, that’s the first thing that I start trying to write about. It’s nothing sad.I think it’s easier to go to a deeper, more meaningful place when you’re writing, that sort of wave of sadness. And yeah, I write happy songs, but sometimes it’s hard to to latch on to something that is meaningful.

Pain and sadness are more full of nuances.

Chris: Yeah, and also just trying to present yourselves as real, which is another thing we’ve tried to do. We just don’t want to sound like oh, everything’s perfect in our marriage, in our relationship. It’s not.

Erin: Right. It’s not.

My final question really is just what kind of is coming up for the rest of the year?

Chris: We don’t exactly have a timeline yet. We’ve got a little bit written, but we’ve got a lot of writing left to do. We have to decide if we’re going to just kind of like self-produce a record. We’re going to try and compile it and then maybe be back in Nashville and get a little studio time.

Erin: Yeah, that’s the nice thing about doing a lot ourselves and being independent. We can decide when we feel like it’s ready to put out into the world.

Well we’re excited for when that new music comes out. Thanks for your time today guys.